Original author: TechFlow
In this wave of Meme bull market, due to being constantly overshadowed by the Solana ecosystem, even though large MC memecoins are frequently emerging, the Meme projects in the Base ecosystem still appear to be "quietly rising".
And in the past two days, a token called $ANON in the Base ecosystem, which was launched only six days ago, has been rising all the way, reaching a peak market cap of 22 million dollars.
Although it cannot match the "one-day breakthrough" of the current Solana Meme projects, the significant rise of $ANON in the Base ecosystem is still worth exploring, as the market's attention is more focused on the frenzy around BTC and Solana.
Is $ANON a new value narrative or a new layout of a conspiracy group in the Base? TechFlow analyzes the origin and development of $ANON through event sorting.
Supercast and Superanon
The story begins with the Polish developer woj (@wojtekwtf) creating the social product application Supercast based on the Farcaster protocol in October 2024. Supercast is a peer-level application layer like the top social product Warpcast in the Base ecosystem. Supercast introduced a feature called Superanon, which supports users to post anonymously through Superanon accounts by paying a membership fee of 10 U/month using zk proof technology.
Obviously, the Superanon application that allows anonymous posting is very popular among crypto users (or Farcaster ecosystem users). Just three weeks after its launch, Superanon already has more than 4,300 followers, and many of the most heated discussions about Farcaster are posted anonymously through the Superanon account. The developer woj himself is also very proud, saying "this is the most successful launch I've had recently".
Anonymous users + AI minting, is $ANON really a community token?
Superanon has been running smoothly since its launch. On November 14th, an anonymous user interacted with the AI Agent account @clanker in the Farcaster ecosystem through the Superanon account, successfully minting a MEME token called $ANON, and then airdropping 1% of the tokens to the Supercast founder woj, who was unaware at the time.
(It is worth mentioning that the recently popular AI Meme $LUM in the Base ecosystem was also released by the AI Agent @clanker, with a current market cap of 30 million dollars.)
Until woj woke up and found $25,000 worth of $ANON in his wallet, he directly chose to airdrop all the $ANON in his wallet to the over 1,000 paying members of Supercast. (woj's original words: "It's cool, but I can't fully support it, because any Supercast token will be distributed to its users.")
woj's very crypto-spirited move was greatly appreciated by the community, and combined with the "zk+anonymous+AI minting" version buff of $ANON itself, the community naturally went crazy for the sufficiently decentralized narrative of $ANON, reaching a peak market cap of $4.5 million in less than a day.
At the same time, the community also supported woj's crypto spirit with practical actions: $ANON holders in the Farcaster community voluntarily sent over $40,000 worth of 13 million tokens to the developer to be redistributed to Supercast users.
The uppercase vs. lowercase dispute is back?
However, before the uppercase $ANON had even boiled for long, the next day woj posted on warpcast that he wanted to change the "?" icon of superanon to a cute little dog image, mint it as a Non-Fungible Token on the Zora platform and airdrop it to Supercast members, and this NFT can be converted into the lowercase $anon in the form of a picture-to-coin. But he also emphasized that it "currently only has collectible value and is purely coincidental with the uppercase $ANON".
In other words, the woj who just used self-certification to hype up the uppercase $ANON yesterday, the next day launched a lowercase $anon by himself...
However, this round of "uppercase vs. lowercase dispute" is not as intense as $Neiro and $eliza, or rather, the lowercase $anon is not at all a match for the uppercase $ANON. As of the time of writing, the market cap of the uppercase $ANON is close to $20 million, while the market cap of the lowercase $anon is still hovering around $300,000, but woj himself seems to really love the image of this little dog.
The "ANON" application layer begins to further differentiate
With both narrative and consensus, but woj doesn't seem particularly interested in further use cases for $ANON. However, the community has already come up with new ideas for $ANON.
Twitter user @0x Luo has made a classification map of the current "ANON" ecosystem, clearly showing the clear context of the current "ANON" projects.
Developers have created new applications based on $ANON, including anoncast, an anonymous posting application with zk proof for $ANON holders only, and the art project Base Colors.
anoncast
anoncast inherits the anonymous posting function of superanon, but the difference is that users need to hold a certain amount of uppercase $ANON in their wallets to use the application, and different holding amounts unlock different functions.
The most basic posting function requires holding 30,000 $ANON tokens (currently about $450). And more advanced functions, such as promoting posts to X/Twitter platforms or deleting published posts, require holding 1 million $ANON tokens (currently about $16,000).
Crypto heavyweights are also very interested in anoncast, with Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero (@dwr) tweeting and retweeting content about anoncast multiple times, and V God also discussing technical details with anoncast developer @Slokh on Warpcast.
Base Colors
Base Colors is a collection of Internet colors as Non-Fungible Tokens. Each color is unique, and the owner can name it on the blockchain, with no two people able to own the same color and no two colors able to have the same name.
The developer @0 FJAKE said that the unique colors can establish the uniqueness of anonymous identities, i.e. confirming the property of "you are you".
Summary
From $Degen to $ANON, the "product tokens" that have been burning hot on the Farcaster ecosystem do seem to be taking a fairly solid and reliable path - the tokens are always running around the community and users.
It's just that in the course of the journey, there may inevitably be non-community members entering for pure speculation purposes, which is not necessarily a bad thing for the token itself, as the continuous price increase will also allow more "outsiders" to further understand the project itself, thereby retaining more users interested in the community.
Tokens like $Degen and $ANON, their real value does not lie in the short-term market cap fluctuations, but in whether they can build a self-organizing, self-evolving ecosystem. Such an ecosystem can continuously adapt to user needs and evolve with the push of the community, ultimately transforming from the simple frenzy of Meme speculation to the practical utility of the token.
